Slashdot Mirror
Software Can Model How a Wildfire Will Spread (economist.com)
The rapid flames that roached densely populated areas in Mati, a seaside resort near Athens on July 23, could have been avoided. Gavriil Xanthopoulos, a wildfire expert at Greece's Ministry of Rural Development and Food, believes the unfortunate incident could have been averted if proper use had been made in advance of fire-simulation software [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: Fed with data on the area's vegetation, building materials, paved surfaces, paths to the sea and weather patterns, such software would have suggested, he says, those places where trees and brush should have been removed, roads widened and evacuation paths built -- not to mention how zoning laws could have been better devised in the face of fire risk. Greece, Dr Xanthopoulos laments, has been slow to adopt such software. Others are not so dilatory. America's Forest Service, for instance, uses a model developed by Esri, a geographic-information firm in Redlands, California, to assess fire risk. This model feeds on data on the distribution and types of trees, bushes and other vegetable ground cover, and on construction materials used in an area.
These data are collected mainly by satellites and aircraft, but rangers and crews of firefighters contribute detail from the ground. According to Chris Ferner, a wildland-fire technology specialist at Esri, even entering the diameters of tree trunks and the sites of clogged culverts (which alter patterns of water flow) is grist to the software's accuracy. Once a piece of fire-forecasting software such as Esri's knows how much inflammable stuff there is on the land, it can bring in data on rainfall, snowfall, sunshine, temperature and the like, to work out how this might change in the future, as well as how much moisture the vegetation holds. It can also take into account past fires and the lie of the land.
These data are collected mainly by satellites and aircraft, but rangers and crews of firefighters contribute detail from the ground. According to Chris Ferner, a wildland-fire technology specialist at Esri, even entering the diameters of tree trunks and the sites of clogged culverts (which alter patterns of water flow) is grist to the software's accuracy. Once a piece of fire-forecasting software such as Esri's knows how much inflammable stuff there is on the land, it can bring in data on rainfall, snowfall, sunshine, temperature and the like, to work out how this might change in the future, as well as how much moisture the vegetation holds. It can also take into account past fires and the lie of the land.
when it models Smokey the Bear.
If the area next to an area is on fire chances are that it will be on fire too!!
I should get paid millions for this insight!!!!
All it requires is a $10 million subscription to ESRI services (a.k.a "proper use")
1/2 the planet going under water, not even a fog in cali.. some still calling this 'weather'.. cease fire stand down, there's moms & tiny babys in every town.. thanks again
This is a perfect application for the Conway's Game of Life.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
News at 11.
Firefighting crews in Canada routinely use fire behavior prediction software.
We've been doing fire modeling for many years. It starts very simply, with the fire triangle: fuel, heat, and oxygen. Then we start adding in concepts more likely to affect wildfire. Heavy spring precipitation leads to more vegetation growth, and when followed by a dry, hot summer, creates a buildup of fuel. Topography is important because fire more readily spreads up a hill than down it. Add in weather data like wind patterns. Previously burned areas are less likely to burn right away because they're cleared of fuel. And so on. We add variables and test the model, gradually improving it over time.
These models are run all the time, and we're familiar with the results. It's a little bit odd to say that a fire simulation would have showed us that we need to widen paved areas or clear brush near buildings, though. Of course it's going to tell us that, because we designed the model with that information in the first place. When we model the risk of a building burning, one of the inputs to the model is the vegetation density near the building, and another is the clear area around the building. We put those in there because they are significant predictors of fire risk.
The problem isn't that people don't know there's fire risk. It's that they don't want to mitigate the risk because it will disturb the natural appearance or historic attributes of the site, or it will be time consuming and expensive, or despite risk assessments they don't take the possibility of fire seriously, or ... .
Why aren't they using more tech to fight fires?
1) In California, a firefighter was killed by a falling tree. I wish robots had been used; I'd rather see a robot killed than a man. Also a bulldozer driver was killed, when his vehicle overturned. Couldn't they drive the bulldozer remotely?
If current robots can't travel on rough ground, or if they can't carry and use firefighting tools, or if driving a bulldozer remotely doesn't give an accurate feel of how steep and slick the ground is, then let's improve our technology so that it will work.
There are remote-controlled robots that can climb stairs. Let's put a camera, mike and speaker on one of them, and send it into a burning building. The robot would search for people, and for a safe exit path for the people.
A firefighter would stay safely out of the building, controlling the robot. He would "see" the inside of the building via the camera that's on the robot. And he could talk to any people in the building via the mike and speaker that are on the robot.
If someone in the building could walk, then the firefighter (speaking thru the robot) could tell the person, "Follow the robot; it will lead you out of the building." If the person was injured, and if the robot could bear some weight, then the person could lean on the robot as they exited the building. If someone was trapped, and if the robot could extract him/her, then even better.
2) I'd love to see a team of chemists and experienced firefighters get together, and figure out a new, better way to put out fires. I don't mean to be sarcastic, but if it takes several days to put out a wildfire, then we need to figure out a better way to put it out.
The chemists would be the experts in removing heat, fuel and oxygen from the fire. The firefighters would share their experience of what the environment is, when fighting a fire. They would say that a solution sounds good, but it won't work because in a real fire, the environment is too crowded, too windy, whatever.
WIFIRE is an integrated system for wildfire analysis, with specific regard to changing urban dynamics and climate. The system integrates networked observations such as heterogeneous satellite data and real-time remote sensor data, with computational techniques in signal processing, visualization, modeling, and data assimilation to provide a scalable method to monitor such phenomena as weather patterns that can help predict a wildfire's rate of spread.
https://wifire.ucsd.edu/wifire-mission
Software Can Model How a Wildfire Will Spread
Oh can it? So can a can of tomato soup, and probably for less money. Here's how it works: open the can, drop it straight onto the floor. See how it just very rapidly goes EVERYWHERE? Pretty good model, I think, and it generally costs less than a dollar, no need to use the fancy stuff, and I'm not counting the cost of the can-opener, which is a common enough thing, and most households have one. To model future size and shape, you will need to have several more cans of tomato soup. Repeat as needed.
Of course, I admit it's not very SPECIFIC about modeling a given, actual wildfire. For that you may need software. I've read somewhere that it can be used to model how a wildfire will spread.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
When fires are set to intentionally cause people to flee from their homes (allowing the arsonist to loot them) they're going to spread.
Sure, you can model that spread too. But even there, when the model will apply to the known environment, which is wrong: there were illegal buildings of which the authorities were unaware, could thus not have included in the model, and that would thus have led to unmodelled outcomes.
In short, the Greeks were fucked anyway and I'm suspicious of the motives of the person claiming otherwise.
I can't believe they didn't call it AI, like everything else.
But then again, so can I. Unless we're talking about a controlled burn, wildfires definitely do not operate within established parameters or obey expectations, life isn't a game with particle effects. Not all wildfires are bad, either, ecosystems need them from time to time. Kind of a waste of time and money, if you ask me. Millennial science and tech is hard to take seriously.
Do you have any idea what sort of conditions these bulldozers operate in? Because if you did, you wouldn't ask for remote control dozers.
1). The terrain isn't level. Think instead, "the opposite of level" and you're getting close;
2). The work is dirty and there's smoke, grease and heat. Your cameras & sensors are going to become useless within 1/2 hour or less;
3). Equipment breakdowns. Lots of them;
4). Conditions, needs and dangers varying constantly.
All this stuff is the death of automation. RC systems require a fair bit of predictability and good conditions, all the time. Firefighting work is the opposite of all that! You'd wind up with expensive dozers broken down, stranded or abandoned all over your fire line. Meanwhile you've invested big bucks and tons of time on this fantasy, thus depriving your fire crews of the support they really need. In short you lack conventional dozers and skilled operators who won't bail on you in your hours of need.
While it's a nice idea "in theory", considering that it would protect lives if it worked, this won't fly in practice. Not even close.
You know what 90% of real forest firefighters use? Incredibly basic equipment. We're talking shovels, axes, pick-axes, that kind of thing. If they can run a water line to a river and get a pump running, they love that too. However their equipment has to be durable, effective, and it can't need resources the firefighters can't get on the line.
They have no interest in lidar-driven, beep-boop robots that are going to break down in the middle of a dangerous situation.